Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 5:43 AM and sunset 8:19 PM, for 14h 36m 26s of daytime. The moon is nearly full today, with 99.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1868, Secretary of State William Seward issues an official proclamation declaring the 14th Amendment ratified.
Recommended for reading in full —
Jennifer Rubin observes The Trump-Russia investigation looks like a mob case:Natasha Bertrand writes The Case for a Trump-Russia Conspiracy Just Got a Little Stronger:
Kelly Weill writes American Racists Look for Allies in Russia (“Pro-Trump hate groups are praising Russia and its ‘macho’ leader after the president’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki”):It also could be “one tile in the larger mosaic” of the alleged conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, Cramer noted, given the discussion of sanctions at the Trump Tower meeting and Russia’s subsequent efforts to undermine the Clinton campaign through hacks and disinformation. “Did the meeting overlap somehow with the Russian hacking? These could have been separate events within the same criminal conspiracy,” Cramer said. Just one day before the Trump Tower meeting, Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, set up a website called DCLeaks with the purpose of disseminating Democrats’ stolen emails, according to court documents filed by Mueller earlier this month. Mueller revealed in those same court filings that Russian hackers began trying to access Clinton staffers’ emails just hours after Trump asked them to. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said in public remarks in July 2016, referring to emails Clinton had deleted from her private server that she’d said were private in nature. It is also worth remembering that, two months before the Trump Tower meeting occurred, a Russia-linked national offered a junior campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, dirt on Clinton from Russia in the form of thousands of stolen emails.
Cohen’s apparent willingness to share information with prosecutors raises questions about what else he could tell them with regard to Trump’s coordination with Russian nationals. Though Cohen has vehemently denied it, the dossier compiled by the former British-intelligence officer Christopher Steele outlining the campaign’s alleged ties to Russia says that Cohen was dispatched to Prague at the tail end of the campaign to pay off Russian hackers in an attempt to keep them quiet. The dossier also alleges a conspiracy between Trump and Russia was managed by Manafort, using the campaign foreign-policy adviser Carter Page as an intermediary. Cohen told me months ago, and has said publicly, that he believes the dossier is a farce. But Mueller is still examining its claims, a person familiar with the investigation told me on the condition of anonymity, making any corroborating information Cohen may have about a possible larger conspiracy incredibly valuable.
Eliot A. Cohen, in Pulling Security Clearances Is Just the Start, makes a key point about the time after Trumpism:While President Donald Trump pals around with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the U.S.’s racist right is making open overtures to Russian white supremacists.
One day after Trump’s disastrous summit with Putin last week, the League of the South, a neo-Confederate hate group, announced that it would launch a Russian-language site. The southern secessionist group’s crush on Russia is the latest appeal by U.S. white supremacists to Russia and Putin—an alliance that has strengthened during the Trump presidency.
“Russia is our friend,” a group of torch-waving racists chanted during an October rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “The South will rise again.”
And what afterwards? Sooner or later there will be a Democratic administration, or one composed of Trump’s opponents in some conservative configuration that opposes the Republican Party. Can the norms be restored then? That is the real issue. Trump is a 72-year-old wrecker: He will be gone at most in six years, and probably a lot sooner. But will his angry successors act in comity and consideration to their predecessors in this administration? For that matter, should they?
The latter question is the hardest one. For sure, career civil servants and military officers of all kinds should face no retaliation for doing what professionals do—observing their oaths and doing their duty conscientiously. And some political appointees (Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis being the shining example) are real heroes for doing their best to contain the worst instincts of the scoundrel president. But what about the run-of-the-mill political appointees?
On the one hand, no one wants a partisanship that takes no prisoners when parties exchange office. But this is not a normal time, and, unfortunately, the Republican Party is no longer a normal party, but is in the compliant and spineless possession of a political buccaneer. It may not be entirely improper to teach the lesson that if you sign up with an administration so utterly lacking in decency, so contemptuous of historical norms of bipartisanship in national security, so lacking in consideration for critics and defeated opponents, you are not going to be treated with the respect normally accorded to senior members of the loyal opposition. The men and women in the shadows, who for the sake of a corner office and an official car and a high title have held their tongues and dishonored their principles, might want to think about that when Sanders tells her next lie.
(It won’t, indeed can’t, be business as usual after Trump goes. Operatives and officials who brought Trumpism to power, and who during its grip will have enriched themselves, either openly or tacitly, cannot expect that afterward those in opposition will let ‘bygones be bygones.’ Not at all – scraping this ilk from the political scene will be a necessary job for years to come. The original Reconstruction did too little in this regard; we in our time will not make a similar mistake.)
Someone really wants to go for a walk (and someone else doesn’t):